Massive loss of life in Brazil nightclub fire

Last Updated 10:16 p.m. ET

BRASILIA, Brazil Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Firefighters responding to the blaze at first had trouble getting inside the Kiss nightclub because bodies partially blocked the club's entryway.

Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members started the blaze in Santa Maria, a university city of about 260,000 people. Officials at a news conference said the cause was still under investigation — though police inspector Sandro Meinerz told the Agencia Estado news agency the band was to blame for a pyrotechnics show and that manslaughter charges could be filed.

17 Photos

More than 200 die in Brazil nightclub fire

Television images showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.

There was only one way out of the nightclub, and no emergency doors, reports CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan. Some panicked patrons mistook the bathrooms for an escape and died there.

The chaos led to confusion -- security guards briefly blocked the exit fearing that customers were fleeing their bar tabs. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they are allowed to leave.

Bodies of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done; officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within minutes.

Within hours a community gym was a horror scene, with body after body lined up on the floor, partially covered with black plastic as family members identified kin.

Outside the gym police held up personal objects — a black purse, a blue high-heeled shoe — as people seeking information on loved ones looked crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything being shown them.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."

Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms.

"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.

A man carries an injured man, victim of a fire at the Kiss club in Santa Maria, Brazil, early Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013.

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AP Photo/Agencia RBS

Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration.

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning"

"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it.

"When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working"

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim. Officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, a major university city with about 250,000 residents at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

An earlier count put the number of dead at 245.

Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.

Brazil President Dilma Roussef arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile.

"It is a tragedy for all of us," Roussef said.

Most of the dead apparently suffocated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.

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'Barrier of Bodies' Trapped Nightclub Fire Victims

A fast-moving fire roared through a crowded, windowless nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, filling the air in seconds with flames and a thick, toxic smoke that killed more than 230 panicked partygoers, many of whom were caught in a stampede to escape.

Inspectors believe the blaze began when a band's small pyrotechnics show ignited foam sound insulating material on the ceiling, releasing a putrid haze that caused scores of university students to choke to death. Most victims died from smoke inhalation rather than burns in what appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Survivors and the police inspector Marcelo Arigony said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they are allowed to leave.

But Arigony said the guards didn't appear to block fleeing patrons for long. "It was chaotic and it doesn't seem to have been done in bad faith because several security guards also died," he told The Associated Press.

Later, firefighters responding to the blaze initially had trouble getting inside the Kiss nightclub because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance," Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper.

Germano Roratto/AFP/Getty Images

Brazil Nightclub Fire: Nearly 200 People Killed Watch Video

Authorities said band members who were on the stage when the fire broke out later talked with police and confirmed they used pyrotechnics during their show.

Police inspector Sandro Meinerz, who coordinated the investigation at the nightclub, said one band member died after escaping because he returned inside the burning building to save his accordion. The other band members escaped alive because they were the first to notice the fire.

"It was terrible inside — it was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another," said Meinerz. "We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take the bodies away."

Television images from Santa Maria, a university city of about 260,000 people, showed black smoke billowing out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who attended the university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at the hot-pink exterior walls, trying to reach those trapped inside.

Bodies of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done; officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within minutes.

Within hours a community gym was a horror scene, with body after body lined up on the floor, partially covered with black plastic as family members identified kin.

Outside the gym police held up personal objects — a black purse, a blue high-heeled shoe — as people seeking information on loved ones crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything being shown them.

Teenagers sprinted from the scene after the fire began, desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms. Many of the victims were under 20 years old, including some minors. About half of those killed were men, about half women.

The party was organized by students from several academic departments from the Federal University of Santa Maria. Such organized university parties are common throughout Brazil.

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

FEATHERY cirrus clouds are beautiful, but when it comes to climate change, they are the enemy. Found at high-altitude and made of small ice crystals, they trap heat - so more cirrus means a warmer world. Now it seems that, by destroying cirrus, we could reverse all the warming Earth has experienced so far.

In 2009, David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, proposed a radical way to stop climate change: get rid of some cirrus. Now Trude Storelvmo of Yale University and colleagues have used a climate model to test the idea.

Storelvmo added powdered bismuth triiodide into the model's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere in which these clouds form. Ice crystals grew around these particles and expanded, eventually falling out of the sky, reducing cirrus coverage. Without the particles, the ice crystals remained small and stayed up high for longer.

The technique, done on a global scale, created a powerful cooling effect, enough to counteract the 0.8 °C of warming caused by all the greenhouse gases released by humans (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50122).

But too much bismuth triiodide made the ice crystals shrink, so cirrus clouds lasted longer. "If you get the concentrations wrong, you could get the opposite of what you want," says Storelvmo. And, like other schemes for geoengineering, side effects are likely - changes in the jet stream, say.

Different model assumptions give different "safe" amounts of bismuth triiodide, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. "Do we really know the system well enough to be confident of being in the safe zone?" he asks. "You wouldn't want to touch this until you knew."

Mitchell says seeding would take 140 tonnes of bismuth triiodide every year, which by itself would cost $19 million.

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All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

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Major floods hammer northern Australia

SYDNEY: A man was missing in raging floodwaters and hundreds of homes were evacuated in northeastern Australia as storms pelted Queensland state on Sunday, with the army put on standby as the weather worsened.

Towns and cities devastated by floods in Queensland two years ago which claimed 35 lives were bracing for another devastating inundation as ex-tropical cyclone Oswald hammered the state.

A 27-year-old man was missing after he attempted to cross a swollen creek near Gympie north of Brisbane and a swift-water rescue team lost their boat trying to retrieve him, according to the town's mayor Ron Dyne.

Dyne said a number of people had taken refuge on the roofs of their homes awaiting rescue from the rising waters, with the centre of Gympie expected to flood later Sunday.

"At this stage, we've got major concerns," said Dyne.

"Everything's occurred rather rapidly given the amount of rain we've had."

A woman was airlifted to safety in Biloela, about 600 kilometres northwest of Brisbane, after spending eight hours in floodwaters clinging to the branches of a tree.

Also in the north, major flooding was expected in the towns of Bundaberg and Gladstone, with hundreds of homes and businesses at risk, some of which had only just been rebuilt following the 2011 floods.

At least one international flight was diverted from Brisbane to Sydney due to the high winds, and Qantas has cancelled a number of domestic services.

About 900 homes had been evacuated in the Gladstone region and about 100 backpackers were sheltering in a community centre at Rainbow Beach after being removed from Fraser Island, according to Dyne.

Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said the army was on standby to assist in the unfolding emergency.

"The challenge now is that we've got multiple events going on," Newman told reporters, adding that he had spoken with Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

"It's likely that we're going to need members of the Australian Defence Force to help with both potentially rescuing people or protecting people, but certainly with clean-up operations."

The weather bureau said there had been damaging winds and reports of "possible tornado activity" throughout southeastern Queensland overnight and warned that further storms were likely.

Disaster management officials said there had been more than 800 emergency calls in the 24 hours to 5am on Sunday, mostly for lost or damaged roofs or requests for sandbags to protect property.

Cyclones and floods are common in Australia's northeast during the warmer summer months. A massive inundation of Queensland in 2011 killed 35 people and brought Brisbane to a standstill for several days, swamping some 30,000 homes.

- AFP/fa

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Anonymous: U.S. justice system has 'crossed a line'

A screenshot at 3:35 a.m. ET on January 26, 2013, of the homepage of the United States federal sentencing website after it had been hacked by a group that identified itself as "Anonymous."

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• U.S. Sentencing Commission website restored


• The FBI is handling the incident as a "criminal investigation"


• Hackers say they have a file of incriminating information ready to launch


• The threat note cited anger over the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz

(CNN) -- In anger over the recent death of an Internet activist who faced federal charges, hackers claiming to be from the group Anonymous threatened early Saturday to release sensitive information about the U.S. Department of Justice.

They claimed to have one such file on multiple servers ready for immediate release.

The hackers hijacked the website of the U.S. government agency responsible for federal sentencing guidelines, where they posted a message demanding the United States reform its justice system or face incriminating leaks to select news outlets.

The lengthy, eloquently written letter was signed "Anonymous."

Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the FBI's Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said the bureau was immediately aware of the threat and is "handling it as a criminal investigation."

"We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person('s) or government agency's network," he said.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission said its website was brought down "temporarily" before it was restored later Saturday. "The commission's publications, training materials and federal sentencing statistics are again readily accessible to visitors to the site," it said in a statement.

The suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz on January 11 triggered the posting of the hackers' message to the web address of the sentencing commission, they said.

His death, which they blamed on the justice system, "crossed a line," the letter said.

How Aaron Swartz helped build the Internet

A YouTube video accompanied the message, and made use of images from Cold War nuclear scenarios and games of strategy. The letter contained nuclear metaphors to refer to chunks of embarrassing information.

The hackers said they have obtained "enough fissile material for multiple warheads," which it would launch against the Justice Department and "its associated executive branches."

It gave the "warheads" the names of U.S. Supreme Court justices.

'Anonymous' threatens Westboro Baptist

Anonymous accused the FBI of infiltrating its ranks and claimed the federal government is applying "highly disproportionate sentencing" to ruin the lives of some of its members.

Swartz, 26, was facing federal computer fraud charges and could have served 35 years in prison. Anonymous said he "was killed," because he "faced an impossible choice."

His family has issued a statement saying that federal charges filed over allegations that he stole millions of online documents contributed to Swartz's decision to take his own life. The files were mostly scholarly papers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Opinion: Why the Net grieves Aaron Swartz

Swartz's suicide has inspired a flurry of online tributes and mobilized Anonymous, the loosely defined collective of so-called "hacktivists" who oppose attempts to limit Internet freedoms. Both Swartz and Anonymous have been stark proponents of open access to information and open-source programming.

A review of a cached version of the USSC.gov website showed the Anonymous message on its homepage early Saturday.

Anonymous also posted an editable version of the website, inviting users to deface it as they pleased. Multiple pages -- not only the home page -- appeared to allow users to alter them.

The "warhead" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code.

The hackers said they chose the commission's website because of its influence on the doling out of sentences they consider to be unfair.

CNN's Carol Cratty, Jason Moon, AnneClaire Stapleton contributed to this report

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1 officer killed, 2 wounded near La. casino

Updated 8:50 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS Police on Saturday arrested a man suspected of fatally shooting a police officer and critically wounding two sheriff's deputies after allegedly setting fire to a mobile home in south Louisiana, where an elderly man's body was found.

A Chitimacha tribal officer was pronounced dead at the scene of the shootings in Charenton, while two St. Mary Parish sheriff's deputies were critically wounded and taken to local hospitals, said Louisiana State Police Trooper Stephen Hammons.

This photo provided by the Louisiana State Police shows Wilbert Thibodeaux.

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AP Photo/Louisiana State Police

Hammons said the officers were responding to a report of an armed man walking down a road near the Cypress Bayou Casino when Wilbert Thibodeaux, 48, of Charenton allegedly shot them.

"Thibodeaux fired at the Chitimacha Officer, fatally wounding him," state police said in a news release. "As two St. Mary Deputies, who were in the same car, arrived at the scene Thibodeaux fired multiple shots hitting the deputies. During the encounter, Thibodeaux was shot."

Investigators found the burned remains of a man after extinguishing a fire at a mobile home that Thibodeaux is suspected of setting before the officers confronted him, Hammons said.

Police identified the deceased man in the mobile home as Eddie Lyons, 78, of Charenton. "Detectives suspect Lyons was shot by Thibodeaux before the fire," state police said in a news release.

Thibodeaux was treated at a hospital for a gunshot wound that wasn't considered life-threatening and released, according to Hammons, who said investigators were questioning him Saturday evening. Charges against him are pending.

The state Fire Marshal's office is investigating the fire.

"Today is a difficult day for our partners in St. Mary Parish," Col. Mike Edmonson, the State Police superintendent, said in a statement. "My thoughts and prayers are with the deputies and the officer's families tonight. I know the coming days and weeks will be difficult ones for the men and women of the Chitimacha Police Department and the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's Office. We will assist their agencies in any way we can during these trying times."

The casino is run by the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana and is less than a quarter-mile from the scene of the shootings. Hammons said the shootings occurred near but not on tribal land.

"Everybody is just in shock. It's small-town America," said Jacqueline Junca, the tribe's secretary and treasurer.

Police didn't immediately release the names of the officers. Authorities said they will do so at a Monday news conference.

Tribe councilman Toby Darden said the slain officer was married and had two grown children, but he declined to give his name.

"He's a real great guy. Extremely dedicated to his job. Very brave," Darden said.

He was one of seven full-time officers who patrol a 260-acre reservation that has roughly 150 homes, a grocery store, a small school and government offices.

"Everybody knows the officers personally," Darden said. "It's devastating."

Junca said the tribe has around 1,200 members, roughly half of whom live on the reservation.

Access to and from the casino was restricted for roughly 90 minutes as a precautionary measure while police responded to the shooting, said casino spokeswoman Nancy Herrington. Charenton is located about 45 miles southeast of Lafayette.

"We are very much in business and have been," Herrington said later Saturday. "We have events tonight. All of those are taking place."

A spokeswoman for the sheriff's office and a tribal police dispatcher referred questions about the shootings to the State Police.

"We've got a lot of unanswered questions," State Police Capt. Doug Cain said.

One of the injured deputies was taken to a hospital in New Orleans and the other was taken to a Lafayette hospital. Both were listed in critical but stable condition Saturday evening, Hammons said.

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Newtown Families March for Gun Control in DC

Jan 26, 2013 4:59pm

(YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Near-freezing temperatures didn’t stop several thousand gun-control activists from bearing their pickets today, carrying signs emblazoned with “Ban Assault Weapons Now” and the names of gun violence victims in a demonstration organized as a response to the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. last month.

Walking in silence, the demonstrators trudged between Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument over a thin layer of melting snow. They were joined by politicians and some families of the Newtown victims.

March organizer Shannon Watts said the event was for the “families who lost the lights of their lives in Newtown, daughters and sons, wives and mothers, grandchildren, sisters and brothers gone in an unfathomable instant.”

“Let’s stand together and use our voices, use our votes to let legislators know that we won’t stand down until they enact common sense gun control laws that will keep our children out of the line of fire,” she told demonstrators.

Watts founded One Million Moms for Gun Control after the killing of 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in December. In a profile with the New York Times, Watts said her 12-year-old son had suffered panic attacks after learning of last summer’s Aurora, Colo., theater shooting, leaving her at an impasse over how to talk to him about the latest tragedy.

Also among the speakers was a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, Collin Goddard.

“We need to challenge any politician who thinks it’s easier to ask an elementary school teacher to stand up to a gunman with an AR-15 than it is to ask them to stand up to a gun lobbyist with a checkbook,” he said.

The demonstration comes amid a push by progressive lawmakers to enact stricter gun control measures as a response to the trend of recent mass killings, although any hypothetical bill would likely face strong opposition in Congress.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., was among the demonstrators today.

“The idea that people need high-capacity magazines that can fire 30, 50, 100 rounds has no place in a civilized society,” he said. “Between the time we’re gathered here right now and this time of day tomorrow, across America, 282 Americans will have been shot.”

The congressman was quoting statistics compiled by the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence.

INFOGRAPHIC: Guns by the Numbers

Last week President Obama proposed a sweeping overhaul of federal measures regulating gun ownership, including a universal background check system for sales, banning assault weapons,  and curbing the amount of ammunition available in weapon clips.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Thursday found 53 percent of Americans viewed Obama’s gun control plan favorably, 41 percent unfavorably. The division was visible today, as a handful of gun-rights advocates also turned out on the National Mall to protest what they believe would be infringements on their Second Amendment liberties.

ABC’s Joanne Fuchs contributed to this report.

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Today on New Scientist: 25 January 2013

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World's oldest portrait reveals the ice-age mind

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Stress's impact can affect future generations' genes

DNA analysis has yielded the first direct evidence that chemical marks which disable genes in response to stress can be passed on to offspring

Uncharted territory: Where digital maps are leading us

The way we use maps is evolving fast, says Kat Austen, and it will change a great deal more than how we navigate

Feedback: Tales of the stony turd industry

Fossilised faeces in Shitlington, confusing railway notices, organic water, and more

Duolingo gives language learning a jump start

First evidence that Duolingo, a new website that helps you learn a language while translating the web, actually works

Dolphins form life raft to help dying friend

A group of dolphins was caught on camera as they worked together to keep a struggling dolphin above water by forming an impromptu raft

Zoologger: Supercool squirrels go into the deep freeze

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Greek economic crisis has cleared the air

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Body armour to scale up by mimicking flexible fish

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Astrophile: Split personality tarnishes pulsars' rep

Pulsars were seen as cosmic timekeepers, but the quirky way in which one example shines suggests we can't take their behaviour for granted

Shrinking proton puzzle persists in new measurement

The most precise experiment yet to find the proton's radius confirms that it can appear smaller than our theories predict - is new physics needed?

Tight squeeze forces cells to take their medicine

A short sharp squash in these channels and a cell's membrane pops open - good news when you want to slip a molecule or nanoparticle in there

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Obama, Hollande hold phone talks on Mali offensive

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama voiced support Friday for France's military intervention in Mali and vowed to work with French counterpart Francois Hollande to tackle extremism across North Africa.

The two presidents discussed other "shared security concerns," including Algeria, Libya and Syria, during telephone talks, the White House said in a statement.

"The president expressed his support for France's leadership of the international community's efforts to deny terrorists a safe haven in Mali," it added.

In condemning a deadly hostage-taking operation by militants in Algeria last week, the two leaders "affirmed their mutual commitment to countering terrorism more broadly in North Africa," according to the statement.

Preliminary estimates from the Algerian authorities say 37 foreign hostages and 29 kidnappers died in an attack at the In Amenas gas field and in the military operation that followed.

Hollande also thanked Obama for his "significant support" of the effort in Mali, the White House said.

The US Air Force has deployed C-17 cargo planes to carry French troops and equipment to northern Mali, where they are trying to help flush out radical extremist fighters.

The United States also was providing intelligence to France, drawing on its network of satellites and surveillance drones.

Paris has asked Washington to help with refueling its warplanes taking part in the fight against militant fighters in Mali, but Obama's administration has yet to approve the request.

Obama and Hollande also "emphasized the need to rapidly establish" both an African-led military force in Mali and a "political roadmap that will lead to elections and restoration of democratic governance," the White House said.

The pair "condemned last week's terrorist act in Algeria," and "affirmed their mutual commitment to countering terrorism more broadly in North Africa."

Turning to Libya, in the wake of an uprising that toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the two presidents "noted the importance of sustained assistance to Libya as it works to build effective security sector institutions," the statement added.

Hollande and Obama also spoke about Syria, "expressing their strong concern about the humanitarian crisis affecting not just Syria but also neighboring countries and reiterating their commitment to assisting the Syrian people achieve political transition to a post-Assad Syria," the statement said.

Syria's civil war has already claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people since March 2011, according to the United Nations, which has predicted that the number of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries will double to 1.1 million by June if the conflict does not end.

- AFP/fa

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RNC chief 'intrigued' by proposed electoral change

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: A spokesman for the Virginia governor says he does not support the proposal


• GOP state legislatures consider changing how they allocate electoral votes


• The proposed changes would have hurt President Obama in last year's election


• A similar push followed the hotly contested 2000 presidential election

Washington (CNN) -- If at first you don't succeed, try to change the rules.

A proposal under consideration in Virginia's Republican-led state Legislature would change how the commonwealth allocates its 13 electoral votes in the wake of Democratic President Barack Obama's re-election last November.

Obama won the popular vote in the crucial battleground state to claim all 13 electoral votes, even though GOP challenger Mitt Romney beat him in seven of the 11 congressional districts.

Under the proposed alternative system, electoral votes would get divvied up by congressional districts won. In addition, Virginia's two other electoral votes -- one for each U.S. Senate seat -- would go to the candidate who won the most congressional districts.

If the district-based system had been in effect in Virginia last year, Romney would have gotten nine electoral votes to four for Obama.

Jindal urges GOP to stop being 'stupid'

While a subcommittee has advanced the Virginia proposal, skepticism expressed by some GOP state senators raised doubts that it would proceed any further.

Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, does not support the plan, according to his spokesman.

"He believes Virginia's existing system works just fine as it is. He does not believe there is any need for a change," Tucker Martin said in statement.

However, Reince Priebus, newly re-elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the idea worth examining.

"I think it is a state issue, but personally I'm pretty intrigued by it," he told reportersFriday.

Opinion: Where the stupidity really lies

The state party chairman in Florida, Lenny Curry, questioned the wisdom of such a move at a time when the party is trying to broaden its support.

"It seems to me we ought to be focused on connecting with voters and bringing them into our party versus trying to change the game," Curry said.

To Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, the concept doesn't violate democratic principles, but he called it a bad idea.

"Close elections would likely always result in extensive recounts, we could see huge disparities between the popular and electoral vote, and the partisan motive behind it would be transparent," he wrote Friday on the group's website.

Currently, only Nebraska and Maine use a district-based plan for allocating electoral votes.

Their systems differ from the Virginia proposal by awarding the two additional electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, rather than who won the most districts. Last year, both split their electoral votes between Obama and Romney.

Other GOP-controlled state legislatures reportedly contemplating changes to their electoral vote allocation include Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

Under the Electoral College system, each state is worth a certain number of electoral votes based on population. Winning the presidency requires a majority of the electoral vote, regardless of who wins the popular vote.

States have the power to decide how their electoral votes get allocated, the National Conference of State Legislatures noted on its website.

It cited a similar push for change after the 2000 election, when Democratic Vice President Al Gore won the national popular vote but lost the electoral vote, and therefore the decision, to Republican George W. Bush.

From 2001 to 2006, bills proposing adoption of the district system were introduced in many states, but failed to pass, according to the NCSL website. Both Maine and Nebraska adopted their district-based systems before 2000.

The issue reflects the regionalization of America's deep partisan divide, with splits in many states between populous urban areas that tend to be more liberal and larger, less populated rural areas that generally are more conservative.

In Virginia, Obama got strong support in two heavily populated northern districts close to Washington as well as a district that includes much of Richmond and Norfolk. Romney won more rural districts in the central, southern and western parts of the state.

Overall in Virginia, Obama got 51% of the total vote -- more than 1.97 million -- compared to Romney's 1.82 million for 47% of the total.

CNN's Mark Preston and Joe Sutton contributed to this report.

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